Occasionally, one gets a glimpse into his daily life at Dux, as in this note, scribbled on a fragment of paper (here and always I translate the French literally):  ’I beg you to tell my servant what the biscuits are that I like to eat; dipped in wine, to fortify my stomach.  I believe that they can all be found at Roman’s.’  Usually, however, these notes, though often suggested by something closely personal, branch off into more general considerations; or else begin with general considerations, and end with a case in point.  Thus, for instance, a fragment of three pages begins:  ’A compliment which is only made to gild the pill is a positive impertinence, and Monsieur Bailli is nothing but a charlatan; the monarch ought to have spit in his face, but the monarch trembled with fear.’  A manuscript entitled ‘Essai d’Egoisme,’ dated, ’Dux, this 27th June, 1769,’ contains, in the midst of various reflections, an offer to let his ‘appartement’ in return for enough money to ’tranquillise for six months two Jew creditors at Prague.’  Another manuscript is headed ’Pride and Folly,’ and begins with a long series of antitheses, such as:  ’All fools are not proud, and all proud men are fools.  Many fools are happy, all proud men are unhappy.’  On the same sheet follows this instance or application: 

Whether it is possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody.  We must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for there are extraordinary people in the world.  My brother, in short, ought to have composed the distich, because he says so, and because he confided it to me tete-’a-tete.  I had, it is true, difficulty in believing him; but what is one to do!  Either one must believe, or suppose him capable of telling a lie which could only be told by a fool; and that is impossible, for all Europe knows that my brother is not a fool.

Here, as so often in these manuscripts, we seem to see Casanova thinking on paper.  He uses scraps of paper (sometimes the blank page of a letter, on the other side of which we see the address) as a kind of informal diary; and it is characteristic of him, of the man of infinitely curious mind, which this adventurer really was, that there are so few merely personal notes among these casual jottings.  Often, they are purely abstract; at times, metaphysical ‘jeux d’esprit,’ like the sheet of fourteen ‘Different Wagers,’ which begins: 

I wager that it is not true that a man who weighs a hundred pounds will weigh more if you kill him.  I wager that if there is any difference, he will weigh less.  I wager that diamond powder has not sufficient force to kill a man.

Side by side with these fanciful excursions into science, come more serious ones, as in the note on Algebra, which traces its progress since the year 1494, before which ’it had only arrived at the solution of problems of the second degree, inclusive.’  A scrap of paper tells us that Casanova ‘did not like regular towns.’  ‘I like,’ he says, ’Venice, Rome, Florence, Milan, Constantinople, Genoa.’  Then he becomes abstract and inquisitive again, and writes two pages, full of curious, out-of-the-way learning, on the name of Paradise: